Day 1/ Polycom Intelligent enterprise Awards

Polycom Intelligent Enterprise Awards

The end of the first day saw the announcement of the Polycom Intelligent Enterprise Awards after an address by the CIO of Polycom, Inc.

Rajat Sharma, Shree Cements won the award in the General Industry category

Glenn Noga, VP and CIO, Polycom, Inc. took the stage after the panel discussion, saying, “For me an interesting comment from the panel discussion was to be aware of what is possible. For me, as an IT professional, that’s really core to our job to make sure that the business community is aware of the potential that technology has for changing what they do on a day-to-day basis.”

He said that the only thing better than giving out awards was to receive them. “Tonight we have the opportunity to recognize some of our peers who have done a fantastic job in taking technology into their company helping make the company run smarter,” he added.

“One of the things I have to do over the next 12-18 months is to drive business productivity. Experts are telling us that an economic recovery is underway. Secondly, how do I make it easier for employees to get their work done by streamlining processes so that business moves efficiently? What are the communications, process reengineering and BI tools that I have to put in place? Thirdly, it’s about IT efficiency and leveraging the assets that we’ve invested in so that IT doesn’t burden the company while scaling as the company grows,” he concluded.

KT Rajan, Allergan India took home the trophy in the Pharma & Health Sciences category

Harish Agarwal, Partner - Advisory Services, Ernst &Young, came on to the stage and explained the process behind the awards. He said, “The awards aim to recognize and honor organizations that have implemented innovative ICT which are collaborative, competitive and used for business advantage and are eco-friendly. The process starts 9-10 months before the awards are given out. The Indian Express management invites participation by sending out forms to CIOs and the forms are put up on the Web site. The group receives the completed questionnaires and about 20-25% of the entries are disqualified because they are incomplete. Another quarter is disqualified when they are independently validated for complete and correct information. After that the Indian Express Group collates and tabulates entries that are in each category and this is independently verified by Ernst & Young after which there’s an internal jury that shortlists three nominees for each category based on the tabulated scores. Then each shortlisted nominee comes in and makes a presentation to the jury where E&Y is also present. The jury votes and scores these nominees through a closed ballot process. E&Y takes the tabulated results. This year the entire jury round was moderated by E&Y to identify the top entries in each category for both the awards and we had 74 nominations across categories for IEA and 52 for SSA. All the shortlisted nominees made live presentations to the jury members who scored each nominee using a predetermined rating scale. Then E&Y tabulated these scores to determine the winners.”

Glenn Noga came back on stage to hand over awards for the first three categories. The first category was Technology & Communciations. The nominees included Sumit Chowdhury, CIO - Reliance Communications; Rupinder Goel, CIO, Airtel; Ashok Adhikary, Associate Director - Systems, Aker Solutions. The winner was Rupinder Goel of Bharti Airtel.

Next up was the BFSI category with C Mohan, CTO, Reliance Life Insurance Company Ltd; Ravikiran Mankikar, General Manager at Shamrao Vithal Co-op Bank and Manoj Chandiramani, Sr. VP and APAC head of IT operations, MF Global. Mohan of Reliance Life Insurance won the award.

Satyen Naik of Sumul won in the Retail and Consumer Products category

In the General Industry category, the nominees were Pertisth Mankotia. Head IT at Sheela Foam India; Rajat Sharma, CIO, Shree Cements Limited and VN Bhaskar, IFFCO Ltd. The winner was Rajat Sharma of Shree Cements Ltd.

Sharma said, “It’s a great honor and privilege for me to receive this coveted award on behalf of the Shree Cement family. I’d like to thank Indian Express and the Tech Senate group for providing us with this opportunity to showcase our stuff and get this level of exposure. This award goes to our domain team and my IT team, as the domain team led the innovation and we were the ones who executed it on the ground.”

Rajiv Jaitly, President, Marketing, The Indian Express Ltd, came on stage to hand out the award for the next category which was Pharma & Health Sciences. K T Rajan - Director Operations IS & Projects, Allergan India; Dr. R. S. Tyagi, Deputy Director & Head, AIIMS and Vishnu Gupta, CIO, Calcutta Medical Research Institute were nominated. KT Rajan won.

Rajan commented, “It was a BI solution. There wasn’t much of technology involved; it was more about changing the business process. Without being modest, this award is dedicated to the users from Sales & Marketing, Supply Chain etc. who were willing to step out their comfort zone, bring in transparency to what they were doing and to implement the entire solution.”

Retail and Consumer Products was the next category with Nilesh Sangoi, CTO, Meru Cabs; J Ramesh, GM-IT, MIRC Electronics Ltd and Satyen Naik, Manager - IT, Sumul Diaries. Satyen Naik won.

Naik introduced Sumul’s Chairman and MD who shared the stage. He added, “I thank Indian Express for first recognizing us in 2004 and now again.

Udai Singh of NIIT won the Jury Special Mention award

“This award goes to the 2.5 lakh farmers who are using our applications across Surat and Surat District. The winners are those guys who are adopting this solution in the villages of Surat.”

Next it was announced that the award for Government/PSU had been scrapped as no entry had been found to be of merit. That brought us to the last category, which was the Jury Special Mention to recognize early movers in the Education segment. This award went to Udai Singh, Executive Vice President, NIIT.

Singh, said, “NIIT stands for both IT and education. We’ve always used technology in education whether it started with simple video-based education when NIIT was set up in 1981. This particular effort is unique because it established a PPP model where we provided a technology platform that would allow premier institutes such as the IIMs (Ahmedabad, Calcutta, Lucknow and Indore) to deliver education for working professionals. One area that we’d researched and found a pressing need that people are not just changing jobs, they are changing careers. Most of us complete our under-grad or post-grad education and after that it is a long haul of 30-40 years where one is working and typically organizations invest in tactical training programs that are relevant to the current role but are not very relevant from a long term career growth point of view. Many of us in this room are engineers and technology professionals but increasingly we find ourselves in roles where we are managing businesses. What this solution enabled was the utilization of scarce resources—gurus are always in short supply—and make it convenient for them to offer a live, interactive experience by recreating the classroom experience at convenient times for working professionals.”

With that the awards came to a close and the day wound to a close.

— Prashant L Rao